Charles Lyndon’s response to Call for Evidence

Charles Lyndon Limited response

Charles Lyndon responds to DBT Call for Evidence on the CAT opt-out regime

The Charles Lyndon team has submitted a response to the Department for Business and Trade’s (DBT) Call for Evidence as part of its review of the Competition Appeal Tribunal’s (CAT) opt-out collective proceedings regime. We invite our friends and colleagues to read our response and share any comments or feedback.

Our key messages

At a high level, we emphasise two overarching points.

1) The review is premature

We are of the firm view that the DBT’s review has arrived too early. The opt-out regime is still developing and the CAT should be given further time to reach a number of critical decisions, including on:

• substantive competition law issues,
• settlement orders, and
• stakeholder entitlement.

Once these judgments are available, government will be in a better position to assess the questions raised by the Call for Evidence—particularly:

• the true cost of the opt-out regime to businesses,
• whether damages are being distributed effectively to harmed consumers, and
• how funders (and other stakeholders) are remunerated in practice.

2) Government should support—and consider expanding—the regime

We encourage government to continue supporting the opt-out regime. We also invite DBT to consider whether the regime could be expanded to other causes of action, such as consumer product liability, where collective redress may be a practical and proportionate route to compensation.

Thanks

With special thanks to Amr El Sawaf, Christiana Karagiorgi, Belinda Lui, Kira Vitale, Sofia Vagnone, Brendan O’Neill, and Joshua Elsey for their skilful research and drafting.